"It could, I don't know, suck your hand down into the blades."

"Now, has that ever really happened?"

"Yes, at some point I'm sure it has happened, probably many times."

"It doesn't have a vacuum. It doesn't suck."

"Well, it's like a wood-chipper, you feed stuff into it, and once it gets rolling, oh boy, watch out."

"You worked in an emergency room; did you ever see any cases of that happening?"

"No, but that doesn't mean it didn't, somewhere."

Amy shuts off the disposal, turns around to face me, leaning against the back of the sink, smiling. "You know how in Magnolia they talk about how just because something seems impossible that doesn't mean it can't happen? Well, I wonder if the opposite applies: just because it seems like surely something like this has happened somewhere before, that doesn't mean it has."

For some reason, I'm not quite willing to accept that proposition.

Amy calls me at work on Monday to tell me that Abby is sick. Really sick. "Her temp's at 102.9, Derek. And that's axillary. Don't you add a degree if it's under the arm?"

"I think you do."

"She's thrown up twice. Her voice is scratchy. Her breathing sounds labored."

"Did you call the doctor?"

"She's out for another half hour. I got her answering service. But I can't imagine they wouldn't want to see her. She's complaining that her ears hurt, too."

I stare at the pile of stuff in my in-box. I look at the unchecked boxes on today's task list. "You think I should come home?"

"I really do."

I shoot off an e-mail that I owe to a co-worker, then go tell my boss the news. He's unmarried, with no children, and I suspect he thinks I'm overreacting. "Isn't there someone else she [Amy] can call?" he asks. "Family?"

"Nope. Besides," I add, a little offended, "I'm worried about her, too."

"Okay."

It's a forty mile trip back home. On the way, I listen to Abbey Road on my tape player. Yes, it's a great album, but the songs are so deeply imprinted in my mind they seem oddly cliché, a mockery of themselves. The danger of greatness is that it is absorbed by the rest of the culture, to the point that it's hard to refer back to the original without thinking it sounds hopelessly derivative.

We don't see the doctor at first; only a resident-in-training or something. He looks like the actor Kyle McLachlan. He asks Abby to open her mouth. She's sitting on my lap, so he's kneeling on the floor in front of me, holding a scope up for Abby to see. She obediently opens her mouth, and he looks inside it. After a few seconds Abby closes her mouth, and she won't open it again. He checks out her ears: they look fine. He spends a good deal of time listening to her chest sounds with his stethoscope. He says he's pretty sure it's nothing but he wants to get the doctor in to confirm it.

The doctor comes in, uses her stethoscope to listen to Abby's breathing, and says she's going to treat her as if it's early pneumonia, just to be safe. She prescribes a broad-spectrum antibiotic, and gives us free samples of a chewable pain killer / fever reducer.

We stop by Wal-Mart to get the prescription filled. While we're there I order carry-out from Pizza Hut, so that on the way home we can stop and pick up our dinner. We're all exhausted.

Amy says she'd like Abby to sleep with her so she can listen to her breathing during the night. I agree to sleep in Abby's bed. Despite her malaise this break from routine excites Abby enormously, and she rushes into her bedroom to tuck me in.

She pats on her bed and says, "Here Daddy, get under cover."

I do as she says.

Amy walks by in the hallway in front of Abby's bedroom. Abby points at me and says, "Look Mommy, Daddy in my bed! Daddy little baby?" she asks me sweetly. Her voice sounds so scratchy.

"I'm a baby," I say.

"Turn off light," she says.

I reach over and turn off the light.

"Leave door open?" she says. She's feeding me my next line, imitating herself on every other night.

"Leave the door open, please," I say.

"Open a crack," she says, imitating my nightly response to her request to leave the door open: I'll leave it open a crack.

In the sudden darkness of her bedroom the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling shine brightly down on me. Amy put these stars up months ago, fashioning her own little cosmos. As I fall asleep I imagine that if I study the pattern of stars hard enough I can trace the deepest echoes of her psyche.

When I wake up the next morning to write I realize, with the clarity of doom, that I'm sick. Sore throat, low-grade fever, body aches, cough. I get up to write anyway. I'm so afraid that if I take even one morning off from my writing I'll never go back. I'm not a morning person. If I fall out of the habit I might never get another word written.

I'm working on a story that can't end happily. It's a family tragedy, and I'm not sure where it's going. I'm discovering that I like loose outlines. I like to come to a story with some questions of my own that need answering. The suspense-will I come up with an honest, satisfying answer to my question or will I flounder?-makes the act of writing enlivening and addictive as never before. But this story can't end well, and I'm old enough to start wondering what the point of art is if it ends on a note of hopelessness.

But I'm sick, and I know the worst is yet to come.

At work I'm coughing every few seconds. I really don't feel well, but I also have to monitor myself to make sure I'm not playing this up just the tiniest little bit for the benefit of others. Even when I'm sick there's a part of me that suspects I'm malingering. There's something heroic about a person who sounds and looks like shit but who comes to work anyway.

Or does this look I'm getting from others signify their resentment that I've come to the office to spread my germs to them? I warn Samantha, a pregnant co-worker, that she might want to keep her distance from me today.

I try to suppress my coughs, because I don't want to fake them. And then I don't suppress my coughs because they sound authentic to me. I keep hoping someone will suggest I go home, so I can say, with a deep stoic voice, "Nah, I'll be okay."

From the little radio I keep in my cubicle at work I hear an interview with Andre Dubus III, the novelist, and son of my favorite short story writer. It's an archive edition, so the interview itself is over six months old. I learn, for the first time, that Andre Dubus senior died last May of a heart attack while he was showering. I'm devastated, crying silently in my cubicle. But aren't I playing this up a bit too, like my cough? It doesn't feel like it. I wipe my tears, open an e-mail I've just received, work on a cost benefit analysis I've been assigned to do. I think about Dubus dying, about how I always secretly hoped that someday, somehow (impossibly, for so many reasons) I'd be invited to be a part of his famous Thursday-nighters writing group.

Abby is still sick, vomiting up thick gobs of phlegm because she hasn't learned yet how to cough them out. The antibiotics haven't kicked in yet. Her fever is still high (the doctors said if it gets past 105, or lasts longer than four days, to give them another call) and Amy and I keep playing this horror movie in our minds.

Whenever I think something horrible is about to happen, my mind tends to think of unfolding events in the past tense. She had a high fever, but the doctors told us to expect that. She seemed okay when we put her to bed. She even laughed at one of my corny jokes. She said she loved me just as she went to sleep. I checked her temperature, and it had gone down a little bit. When Abby's situation worsens, I think She began slipping, and we needed to call the doctor right away, but we didn't.

This week's TV entertainment line-up: an episode of "Law & Order" that the commercials promise will blow me away. ("You ever see anybody do that to a baby before?" one of the homicide investigators is heard to say in disgust at the crime scene.) A TV movie about JonBenet Ramsey. A news magazine segment about a child who is dying from a rare blood disease. A news teaser about yet another baby abandoned in the parking lot at a local hospital. A TV tabloid feature about a child allergic to water.

On the one hand, I know that this is all a necessary catharsis that needs to be played out in our culture over and over again, to give voice to our deepest fears. On the other hand, I'm uncomfortable with the way TV shows seem to garner ratings by promising to show us how much a child has suffered. Or maybe it's always been this way and I've just begun to notice it since Abby was born.

Abby pleads for the antibiotic bottle on the dining room table. She feels nauseous, she knows she's about to throw up, so she runs over to the table and, sobbing and crying with desperate impatience, says, "Med'cine, Daddy? Please, med'cine?"

How do you explain to a two and a half year old that you can only take antibiotics twice a day, that they don't work instantly, that you can't help them, you just have to sit there and let them get sick all over you, themselves, the furniture? How do you convey to them that it is not mercilessness that prevents you from helping them, but powerlessness?

I wake up the next morning feeling better, "but still horrible," I report to myself reassuringly. (As long as I'm weathering illness I'm heroic; when I'm well again I'll just be another working stiff.)

In the shower I keenly appreciate the perishability of this body, of myself. But even as dread and fear swarms over me, isn't there also this writerly sense of self-congratulation that I'm recognizing this dread, I'm feeling these things, thinking these thoughts? Isn't this mortality a gift? Isn't my appreciation of it the very stuff of great literature?

The story is getting longer and longer, much too long to publish in a magazine. It will need to be pruned mercilessly later. I can't let it end now. I have to keep it going. I don't want it to end in despair, and by God I'll keep working on it until it doesn't.

Kristin, Shane, Keith and I take Abby and Cassidy sledding behind the house where I grew up. Keith talks me into trying out the snow-surfboard thingie he brought along with him, and I do. After awhile I get the hang of it, sort of. At one point, though, I wipe out, badly, and as my body is hurled forward, as I'm curling around in the air, as my face hits a bank of snow and my body flips around over and over in the dust of snow I'm thinking to myself, with joy, "I bet this looks really, really cool."

Abby keeps saying, to whichever of us is closest, "I need you." She wants to be held, constantly. The horrible thing about being sick is that it emphasizes how alone we all truly are in our suffering.

And then, absurdly, I ask her, "Do you wanna dance?"

She has said no to everything we've asked her tonight. Do you want some water? Juice? Milk? Snack? Sandwich? Chicken nuggets? Apple sauce? Jello? No, no, no, etc. But now she says, almost inaudibly because her throat is so sore, "Uh-huh." And to prove that she does in fact want to dance, she gets down off the couch, walks over to the TV, and turns it off. This is always part of our ritual before dancing: she turns the TV off while I turn the stereo on.

I put on The Jayhawks, and she immediately starts kicking her legs around. It's not as energetic as it usually is, but she's smiling, and she's trying. We dance. We're sick, but we dance.

Amy calls me while I'm on my lunch break at work. She doesn't say anything. Instead, she hands the phone to Abby. Abby says into the mouthpiece, "I feel betta, Daddy." She breathes (her breaths still sound labored, a little wheezy), listening for me to answer. She doesn't realize she's just leaving a voice-mail message. After a few seconds, Amy takes the phone and tells me that Abby's fever is down, that Abby wanted me to know that.

As I'm writing the final paragraphs of my story, my heart sinks, just as the heart of my main character is sinking, and I know there's just no way to make it a happy ending. After hearing what he's heard on the phone, my character hangs up, and he thinks about what to do next.

And the oddest thing happens. He finds a clue, a remote possibility of reconciliation, in the very piece of bad news he's just received. He at least recognizes how he must react to the words he's just heard, if he wants to call himself a father. He knows he has to at least try to make things right. The final paragraph doesn't end happily, exactly, but it ends with at least a slight gesture toward healing.

I'm crying as I finish it, because I've avoided cliché and I've been as honest as I can be and yet I've still managed to avoid despair. And I realize this is a lesson I've learned from Dubus. Later there will be doubt over the worth of what I've written, and a lot of struggle to get it into any kind of submittable condition, but for a moment at least I feel what I imagine Dubus himself must have felt many times in his long career as our best (once) living short story writer: "I could die now, they can't take this away from me."

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